Summary

Our Score

8/10

User Score

Review Price free/subscription

While we've lavished the Wave with a fair amount of praise so far, when it actually comes to design, we're not quite so keen. It looks perfectly okay but it definitely lacks the minimalist chic of the iPhone 4 or Palm Pre Plus, which is a shame as it wouldn't have taken much to really push it to the next level.
Moving on to less subjective fare, the Wave has a good selection of external features with a 3.5mm headphone jack on the top, alongside the speaker, and a microUSB socket that's hidden behind a rather neat little sliding door. There's also a stepped (one level for focus, one to take the picture) camera button, which is always a useful addition.

Although you get 1.5GB of internal storage, you can only access 390MB of it, so you'll be wanting to add some extra storage, which can be done by adding a microSD card. Annoyingly the slot for this is situated under the battery, so you have to turn the phone off to swap it. You can access your files by plugging the phone into your PC, though, making it far from a life ending problem.
Turning the phone on and the first thing that strikes you is its superb screen. It uses Samsung's much-vaunted new Super AMOLED technology, which provides brighter pictures for lower power consumption. Frankly, we've not noticed a significant difference between these and any other good AMOLED screens, but they certainly are very good. It's bright, very sharp thanks to its 480 x 800 pixels, has great contrast and viewing angles, and produces incredibly vivid colours. In fact they're almost too strong, giving orange and red hues in particular an almost radioactive look. Nevertheless, for most everyday purposes this won't be a concern and you'll instead just enjoy the sheer brilliance of it.
Also impressing us is the screen's touch sensing abilities. Presumably it's largely the responsiveness of the operating system as much as anything but regardless; interaction with the screen is very accurate, quick, and smooth.